LANGDON SMI
rY.WHEN YOU WERE A TADPOLE AND I WAS A
B 3 315 133
THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
PRESENTED BY
PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND
MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID
VOI ION
When you were a tadpole
and I was a fish"
By LANGDON SMITH
Boston, JOHN W.
LUCE and COMPANY. MCMIX
Copyright, 1909,
BY L. E. BASSETT AND COMPANY
>
INTRODUCTION
M375912
"EVOLUTION AND THE MAN WHO
WROTE IT
To weld the theory of soul-transmigration to the
reality of evolution was an inspiration that, coming
to Langdon Smith in the midst of a busy life, never
theless sung itself into his heart with a wealth of poetic
meaning and suggestion that found its ultimate ex
pression in the verses which so securely link his name
with those whom no passing moment can plunge into
obscurity.
In one hundred and eight short lines of poetry he
reached back into the geological beginning, picked up
the first sparks of life lying inert in the Paleozoic
period and brought them side by side into the light
of present day civilization and to the highest type of
life thus far developed, by stages opposed to no law of
nature as interpreted by modern philosopher and scien
tist.
The author did more than this. To have stopped
there would have been merely clever, merely the ex
pression in poetic form of Darwin s " Descent of Man,"
and his epic of Evolution is far more than cleverness,
it has the ring of genius.
The crowning glory of " Evolution " is, perhaps, the
manner in which he interwove throughout his master
piece of imagination a golden thread of romance that
becomes more and more lustrous as the story unfolds.
He linked inseparably physical life and spiritual life,
the so-called vital and eternal sparks, as, into the web
of the lives that evolve, he wove the woof of love and
brought them down through the ages together as one.
" For I loved you even then," he sings as he throws
his soul back through the ages to the first vertebrates
of the Paleozoic period. Ever together he pictures
"life by life," "love by love," "breath by breath,"
" death by death " and back to " life by life " again,
down through every stage of evolution s wonderful path
from darkness to light, from trilibite to civilized man.
The beginning of matter, the dawn of life, the
changes through all the eons, the theory that life lives
anew and love, the soul, lives eternally with it, Langdon
Smith encompassed in his poem.
And yet he found no need to dispute Huxley, Spen
cer, Darwin or Lowell; he saw no reason to rail at
Buddha, Pythagoras, Confucius, Orpheus, Socrates or
Jesus. He felt that he had lived in the dim past and
that he would live in the lustrous future. He reduced
immortality to a science and science to immortality.
Langdon Smith was born in Kentucky Jan. 4, 1858,
and received a common school education at Louisville.
In boyhood he served in the Comanche and Apache wars
as a trooper, his letters descriptive of these campaigns
winning him his first newspaper position. Later he
acted as a war correspondent during the extended
fighting with the Sioux tribes. In 1894 he married
Marie Antoinette Wright and soon after went to Cuba
as correspondent for the New York Herald, being a
non-combatant on Gen. Maceo s staff during the Cu
ban s effort to overthrow Spanish rule. He again went
to Cuba at the outbreak of the Spanish- American war
as a representative of the New York Journal. One of
the first at the front, he was present at all the principal
engagements, taking high rank as a war correspondent.
Aside from his success as a newspaper writer, his
novel " On the Pan Handle " met a favourable re
ception; his short stories made him still better known,
but it is as the author of " Evolution " that he is best
remembered. Skilled as a war correspondent, himself
a veteran Indian fighter, a technical writer of sports,
possessed of a mentality too great to be handicapped
through lack of university training, he thought for him
self upon life and death, of the past and future, and
in " Evolution " voiced his beliefs.
The first few stanzas of " Evolution " were written
in 1895 and published in the New York Herald where
he was then employed. Four years later, when a mem
ber of the New York Journal staff, he wrote several
more. These he laid aside for a while and then, from
time to time, added a stanza until it was completed.
Whether the editorial department failed to appreciate
the poem, or the foreman of the composing room needed
something with which to fill out a page is not known,
but " Evolution " first appeared in its entirety in the
center of a page of want advertisements in the New
York Journal.
A work of such merit, however, could not be lost.
Mr. Smith received thousands of congratulatory let
ters from all parts of the world, accompanied by re
quests for copies of the poem which were exceedingly
difficult to secure until reprinted in April, 1906, in
iv
" The Scrap Book," edited by Mr. Frank A. Munsey.
April eighth, 1908, Langdon Smith died at his home
in New York. Admirers of " Evolution " have been
struck with the coincidence of his wife s death occurring
as it did within five weeks of his own. Their lives and
affections linked as they were, in his poetic fancy at
least, since the beginning of time seem to have created
between them in reality a bond too close to survive a
parting.
LEWIS ALLEN BROWNE.
EVOLUTION
THE FIRST BOOK OF MOSES
CALLED GENESIS
Chapter I
Verse 1 . In the beginning God created the heaven
and the earth.
Verse 20. And God said, Let the waters bring forth
abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and that
may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
The paleozoic period, embracing the oldest division
of the geological series, may be properly separated into
two great divisions, an older and a newer. The newer
paleozoic period is distinguished by the number and
variety of its fishes and amphibia. Century Dictionary.
The progenitors of man must have been aquatic in
their habits; for morphology plainly tells us that our
lungs consist of a modified swine-bladder which once
served as a float. Charles Darwin.
The Cambrian is the lowest of the primary strata
exhibiting unmistakable organic remains.
Percival Lowell.
OLUTION
I
WHEN you were a tadpole and I was
a fish,
In the Paleozoic time,
prawled through the ooze
th many a caudal
skittered
Through
brian
The man of science cannot hesitate. He cannot be
lieve that there was actually a break between the inor
ganic and the organic evolutions, bridged over by the
direct action of the finger of God. He must believe that
waving palm trees and toddling children and wave-beaten
rocks are alike the present natural outcome of an abso
lute sequence of cause and effect, passing back to the
blazing star that formed the elements that comprise them.
Professor Robert K. Duncan,
University of Kansas.
Virtually only six so-called elements go to make up
the molecule of life. It is the number of its constituent
atoms, and the intricacy of their binding together, that
give it the instability to produce vital actions. Carbon,
hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur are
all that is required.
Spontaneous generation is as certain as spontaneous
variation, of which it is in fact only an expression.
Percival Lowell, LL.D.,
Director of the Lowell Observatory
The Caradoc sandstone named by Sir Roderick
Murchison from the mountain called Caer Caradoc, in
Shropshire, consists of shelly sandstones of great thick
ness, containing trilobites and many other fossils.
-Sir Charles Lyell,F.R.S.
Mindless we lived and mindless we
loved,
And mindless at last we died ;
And deep in a rift of the Caradoc
drift
We slumbered side by side.
The world turned on in the lathe of
time,
The hot lands heaved amain,
Till we caught our breath from the
womb of death,
And crept into light again.
Organic development proceeded from amoeba to fish,
attaining no mean height in the process. But at last a
better habitat offered itself, and was speedily appropriated.
Weathering of the land and constantly changing chemic
processes prepared the continents for organic use. Plants
gradually found foothold, and insects an abode. Then
came the exodus from the sea. We may picture some
adventurous fish, spurred blindly from within, essaying the
shore in preference to the main. Finding the littoral not
inhospitable, the pioneer was followed by others whom
variation had specially endowed. Thus arose the am
phibia in the Carboniferous era, visitors only to the solid
ground. From them came the reptiles, their descendants,
in the Permian, who, from the temporary sojourners their
fathers were, developed into permanent denizens of the
new abode. From this aboriginal crawling out upon terra
firma the organism progressed until finally it came to stand
erect and call itself a man.
Lowell.
Even footprints of past reptiles confront us, legible still
on the hardened sands of time, as if made yesterday in
the spots they traversed hundred of centuries ago.
Lotoell.
!p
v. ^
*&&
^d
III
We were Amphibians, scaled and
tailed,
^yi^ And drab as a dead man s hand;
Illfflii ^ e co il e d at ease neath the dripping
trees,
Or trailed through the mud and
sand,
Croaking and blind, with our three-
clawed feet
Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark
To hint at a life to come.
V
mm
Neocomian is the name given the lower division of the
cretaceous system formed in part at least by the wearing
down of the pre-existing oolithic rocks. The land formed
by such rocks was largely submerged before the origin of
the white chalk which was formed in a more open sea
and in clearer water. Sir Charles Lyell.
Fresh water formations of the Neocomian period exhibit
fossil remains of terrestrial reptiles, the trunks and leaves
of land plants. Of this period was the Iguanodon Man-
telli, a gigantic lizard a specimen of the thigh-bone of one of
which measures twenty-four inches in circumference. The
saurians, the largest individuals of the reptile family ever
inhabiting the globe, had not at this time entirely disap
peared. Sir Charles Lyell.
With this verse the author ceases to trace the develop
ment of life through the early geological formations and
lays the scene of the next stanza in the comparatively
recent tertiary period. Ed.
Yet happy we lived, and happy we
loved,
And happy we died once more;
Our forms were rolled in the clinging
mold
Of a Neocomian shore.
The eons came, and the eons fled,
And the sleep that wrapped us
fast
Was riven away in a newer day,
And the night of death was past.
Unless we wilfully close our eyes we may with our
present knowledge approximately recognize our parentage.
The Simiadae branched into two great stems, the New
World and Old World monkeys; and from the latter at
a remote period, man, the wonder and glory of the
Universe, proceeded.
Charles Darwin.
The great break in the organic chain between man and
his nearest allies, which can not be bridged over by any
extinct or living species, has often been advanced as a
grave objection to the belief that man is descended from
some lower form, but this objection will not appear of
much weight to those who believe in the general principle
of evolution. At some future period the civilized races of
man will almost certainly exterminate the savage races of
the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous
apes will no doubt be exterminated. The break between
man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will
intervene between man in a more civilized state as we
may hope even than the Caucasian and some ape as low
as a baboon instead of as now between the Negro or
Australian and the gorilla.
Charles Darwin.
Then light and swift through the
jungle trees
We swung in our airy flights,
Or breathed in the balms of the
fronded palms,
In the hush of the moonless nights.
And oh! what beautiful years were
these,
When our hearts clung each to
each;
When life was filled, and our senses
thrilled
In the first faint dawn of speech.
The conceptions of God are various, differing widely
in different systems of religion and metaphysics ; but they
fall in general under two heads : theism, which is most
fully developed in Christianity and in which God is
regarded as a personal moral being distinct from the uni
verse of which he is the author and ruler ; and pantheism,
in which God is conceived as not personal and as identi
fied with the universe. Century Dictionary.
The work of Darwin convinced men of the continuity
of human with animal evolution as regards all bodily
characteristics and prepared the way for the quickly fol
lowing recognition of the similar continuity of man s
mental evolution with that of the animal world.
An Introduction to Social Psychology
by William McDougali
I may add the expression of my belief that the attempt
to draw a psychical distinction between man and the
animal world is equally futile, and that even the highest
faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in
lower forms of life. Huxley, 1863.
Some of us are already convinced that the human soul
in all its power is just as much a product of evolution as
the body. Q- Stanley Hall 1909.
Thus life by life, and love by love,
We passed through the cycles
strange,
And breath by breath, and death by
death,
We followed the chain of change.
Till there came a time in the law of
life
When over the nursing sod
The shadows broke, and the soul
awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.
The cave dwellers of the stone age succeed in point of
time an even earlier group of prehistoric men both so
ancient that no attempt is made to fix the date of their
existence save in geological terms. Ascribed to the
Quatenary period, prehistoric man at the coming of the
glacial period was obliged by the change of climate to
seek the shelter and warmth of caverns, there to take up
his abode during the centuries which elapsed before the
dawn of a later geological epoch.
In France particularly the evidences of cave dwellers
are numerous. The floors of the caverns occupied by
them are found impregnated with their flint implements,
the bones of animals on which they lived, many of which
are of extinct species.
Smithsonian Report.
The aurochs is the European bison, differing but slightly
from the American Buffalo.
Ed.
The great cave bear is extinct and has been in all his
toric time. Its existence is known only from fossil remains
and a single engraving on stone in the Prehistoric Museum
at Faux.
Ed.
I was ihewed like an Auroch bull,
And tusked like the great Cave
Bear;
And you, my sweet, from head to
feet,
Were gowned in your glorious hair.
Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave,
When the night fell o er the plain,
And the moon hung red o er the river
bed,
We mumbled the bones of the slain.
The earliest manifestations of human art consisted of
the chipping of flint implements, which before the close of
the cave dwelling period had reached a state of develop
ment both in design and workmanship comparable with
those found in use among uncivilized peoples almost down
to the present time.
The spear head of this period was of flint or quartz
leaf shaped of considerable length and decreased thick
ness, sometimes made with a shoulder on one side to
enable its being more firmly attached to the wooden
shaft. This last named innovation was the precursor of
the notched arrow and spear head which travelled through
both hemispheres while civilization was yet young and
before history began.
Smithsonian Report.
The mammoth, the last survivor of the three species of
elephant inhabiting Europe, flourished before and during
the glacial period. In size this species exceeded the ele
phant of modern times from which it is further distinguished
by large curved tusks and a thick coat of hair.
Ed.
I flaked a flint to a cutting edge,
And shaped it with brutish craft;
I broke a shank from the woodland
dank,
And fitted it, head and haft.
Then I hid me close to the reedy
tarn,
Where the Mammoth came to
drink ;
Through brawn and bone I drave the
stone,
And slew him upon the brink.
The gregarious instinct is one of the human instincts
of greatest social importance. Its operation in its simplest
form implies none of the higher qualities of mind, neither
sympathy nor capacity for mutual aid.
In civilized communities we may see evidence of the
operation of this instinct on every hand. For all but a few
exceptional, and generally highly cultivated, persons the
one essential condition of recreation is the being one of a
crowd.
Although opinions differ widely as to the form of
primitive human society, some inclining to the view that
it was a large promiscuous horde, others, with more proba
bility, regarding it as a comparatively small group of near
blood relatives, almost all anthropologists agree that primi
tive man was to some extent gregarious in his habits.
This gregarious impulse seems generally to be called
into play in conjunction with some other instinct, render
ing complete satisfaction of its impulse impossible until we
are surrounded by others who share our emotion.
An Introduction to Social Psychology, by William
McDougall.
In calling his kith and kin to the feast the man of the
Stone Age displayed his gregarious instinct in conjunction
with his instinct of self-assertion and the emotion of ela
tion rather than a more developed social sympathy.
Ed.
Loud I howled through the moonlit
wastes,
Loud answered our kith and kin;
From west and east to the crimson
feast
The clan came trooping in.
O er joint and gristle and padded
hoof,
We fought, and clawed and tore,
And cheek by jowl, with many a
growl,
We talked the marvel o er.
In the museum of Natural History in Paris is an engrav
ing found at La Madelaine of a mammoth carved on a
fragment of his own tusk. The lofty skull, the bulging
forehead, the curved tusks and shaggy hair identify it
satisfactorily. It is so well done that one must believe the
artist had seen the animal if he did not make the drawing
from real life.
The engraving tools of this period, specimens of which
are in the National Museum at Washington, are of flint
not dressed to a sharp point from all sides, but V shaped
as are the gravers* of to-day. Some of the specimens are
quite worn, while others are sharp and could now be
used to engrave bones as in the prehistoric times.
The most wonderful exhibition of art in this epoch was
in the representation of animal life. Sometimes the animals
are at rest, but many times they are in action. Hunting
scenes are depicted in which the hunter, a man, is shown
in pursuit of game and in conflict with it. The mammoth,
cave bear, reindeer, horse, bison, musk-ox, birds, and
others are depicted. Some of these are Arctic animals
now, others are extinct.
These engravings and carvings mark the earliest human
expression of the beautiful in art for art s sake and is said
to be the first step in evolution from savagery.
Smithsonian Report.
I carved that fight on a reindeer bone,
With rude and hairy hand,
I pictured his fall on the cavern wall
That men might understand.
For we lived by blood, and the right
of might,
Ere human laws were drawn,
And the Age of Sin did not begin
Till our brutal tusks were gone.
Since the acceptance of the principle of evolution there
has come a realization of the continuity in nature which
establishes in the mind of man a relation of intimacy with
it limited neither by time nor space. The impersonal at
titude from which man viewed nature has given place to
a sense of kinship with it and with every product of its
laws and even with those laws themselves. His thoughts,
should he throw them back a million years, have not
even then travelled so far as to reach the border land of
a time the impress of which he does not bear in his own
person.
Nor is his soul, the moral and emotional part of his
nature, less intimately linked to the history of that dim
past and each succeeding period of time. The untried
soul, whether it lights eyes "deep as the Devon springs"
or no, be it howsoever young it may, is yet of the ages.
For of all the false assumptions on which ethical systems
were once founded none was more so than the conception
of a special faculty of moral intuition or instinct, a conscience
implanted afresh in each human breast as a miraculous
gift.
The truth is, that men are moved by a variety of im
pulses whose nature has been determined through long
ages of evolutionary process without reference to their
life in civilized societies.
Ed.
And that was a million years ago,
In a time that no man knows;
Yet here to-night in the mellow light,
We sit at Delmonico s;
Your eyes are deep as the Devon
springs,
Your hair is as dark as jet,
Your years are few, your life is new,
Your soul untried, and yet
Kimmeridge clay, the lowest series of the Upper Oolite,
consists of dark, bluish gray shaly clay which is sometimes
bituminous and occasionally, as at Kimeridge in the Isle of
Purbeck, passes into a shale so rich in bituminous matter
as to be used as a fuel. The series attains a maximum
thickness of 600 feet.
Chamber s Encyclopaedia.
Beneath the cretaceous rocks in S. E. England a fresh
water formation is found called the Wealden, which is of
great interest as being interlaced between two marine
formations. It is composed of three minor groups, Weald
clay, Hasting sand and Purbeck beds or flags of limestone
and marl. The Wealden formation is rich in fossils. The
bones of birds of the order of Grallae have been discov
ered by Dr. Mantell in the Wealden and appear to be
the oldest well-authenticated examples of fossils of this
class hitherto found in Great Britain.
Lyell s Elements of Geology.
Bagshot sands, or stones, consist of a series of strata
overlying the London clay, the name being from Bagshot
Heath near Windlesham, Surrey, where they were first
examined. They belong to the Eocene system.
Chamber s Encyclopaedia.
WlQfl
At some places, as near Orford, England, the coral
line crag is exposed at the surface, and the bottom of it
has not been reached at the depth of fifty feet. The crag
shell belongs to the older Pliocene period and indicates a
temperate climate.
Lyell s Elements of Geology.
*WJM
?j jj) iKL 8H&J
Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay,
And the scarp of the Purbeck flags,
We have left our bones in the Bag-
shot stones,
And deep in the Coraline crags;
Our love is old, our lives are old,
And death shall come amain;
Should it come to-day, what man may
say
We shall not live again?
I think that one abstains from writing on the immortality
of the soul, because, when he comes to the end of his
statement, the hungry eyes that run through it will close
disappointed ; the listeners say, That is not here which we
desire, and I shall be as much wronged by their hasty
conclusion, as they feel themselves wronged by my omis
sions. I mean that I am a better believer, and all serious
souls are better believers, in the immortality that we can
give grounds for. The real evidence is too subtle, or is
higher than we can write down in propositions, and there
fore Wordsworth s " Ode" is the best modern essay on
the subject. Is immortality only an intellectual quality, or,
shall I say, only an energy, there being no passive ? He
has it, and he alone, who gives life to all names, persons,
things, where he comes. No religion, not the wildest
mythology, dies for him ; no art is lost. He vivifies what
he touches. Future state is an illusion for the ever-present
state. It is not length of life but depth of life. It is not
duration, but a taking of the soul out of time, as all high
action of the mind does : when we are living in the senti
ments we ask no questions about time. The spiritual world
takes place ; that which is always the same. But see
how the sentiment is wise. Jesus explained nothing, but
the influence of him took people out of time, and they felt
eternal. A great integrity makes us immortal : an admi
ration, a deep love, a strong will, arms us above fear.
"Immortality." Ralph Waldo Emerson.
XIII
God wrought our souls from the
Tremadoc beds
And furnished them wings to fly;
He sowed our spawn in the world s
dim dawn,
And I know that it shall not die;
Though cities have sprung above the
graves
Where the crook-boned men made
war,
And the ox-wain creaks o er the bur
ied caves,
Where the mummied mammoths
are.
issfll.j
Nietzsche believed that an ideal human society would
be one in which a vast, inert, religious, moral slave class
stood beneath a small, alert, iconoclastic, immoral, pro
gressive master class. He held that this master class
this aristocracy of efficiency should regard the slave
class as all men now regard the tribe of domestic beasts :
as an order of servitors to be exploited and turned to ac
count. The aristocracy of Europe, though it sought to do
this with respect to the workers of Europe, seemed to him
to fail miserably, because it was itself lacking in true effi
ciency. Instead of practising a magnificent opportunism
and so adapting itself to changing conditions, it stood for
formalism and permanence. Its fetish was property in land
and the worship of this fetish had got it into such a rut
that it was becoming less and less fitted to survive, and
was, indeed, fast sinking into helpless parasitism. Its whole
color and complexion were essentially apollonic.
Therefore Nietzsche preached the gospel of Dionysus,
that a new aristocracy of efficiency might take the place
of this old aristocracy of memories and inherited glories.
He believed that it was only in this way that mankind
could hope to forge ahead, mankind bent on achieving,
not the equality of all men, but the production, at the top,
of the superman.
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche,
by Henry L. Mencken.
Then as we linger at luncheon here,
O er many a dainty dish,
Let us drink anew to the time when
you
Were a Tadpole and I was a Fish.
FIFTY YEARS OF EVOLUTION
FIFTY YEARS OF EVOLUTION
By a fortuitous coincidence the one hundredth anni
versary of Charles Darwin s birth falls within the same
year as that which marks the fiftieth since the publica
tion of " The Origin of Species " in which he laid before
the world for the first time convincing evidence of the
theory of Evolution.
That a double anniversary of such moment, giving as
it did an opportunity to honor on the same occasion both
the nobility of the individual himself and his epoch ma
king work, would be fittingly celebrated, was universally
expected and more than happily realized. The tribute
of every scientific body of importance throughout Eu
rope and America has been paid to the memory of the
dead man and to the ever living, ever waxing revelation
of his mind.
The realization of a new truth, so potent as to uproot
the established attitude of mind of perhaps more than
one-half of the civilized world toward philosophy and
science, is a phenomenon that has been recorded but sel
dom, and fortunately; for, the laws of nature make but
43
slight provision to safeguard against the results of vio
lent change whether it be physical or mental and emo
tional.
But such truths have nevertheless at rare intervals
blazed across the darkling sky that curtains the yet un-
reached limit of human intelligence lighting the beacons
on new heights of learning and understanding,
heights which once gained have become the permanent
heritage of mankind in his advance from whence he
views the ever widening aspect of the material and spirit
ual world beckoning him forward to paths that lead their
winding course through the fertile fields of knowledge
to that temple beyond the horizon where dwells the
Spirit of Ultimate Comprehension.
To such a peak Galileo unfalteringly guided the
steps of men, though the heel of the advance crushed into
dust the philosophy of centuries and the dogma of the
church. To such another Newton led the way by his
discovery of the laws of gravitation. One of lesser height
perhaps, though equally far in the van, was mounted
when the principle of the conservation and correlation
of forces was demonstrated.
Can there be a moment s hesitation in adding to this
44
company the name of Charles Darwin or in recognizing
in the watchfire of Evolution the flaming torch which
lights the topmost crag in the whole range of human
understanding?
If a doubt lingers in any mind it will vanish on giving
a little reflection to the views held by the leading zoolo
gists, biologists, theologians, philosophers and indeed the
mass of educated men in general before the publication
of " The Origin of Species " and comparing such views
with those now held either by them or their representa
tives of later generations.
The theologians, who from the beginning of time have
accredited themselves as the custodians of all funda
mental truth having, by hasty discards of old dogmas,
survived the shock of learning that the earth is round,
and that the sun, moon and stars are held in place in
the universe by the force of gravity, continued to hold
as they had for some four thousand years to the theory
of individual creation as set forth by the biblical authors.
In the main this proposition had passed unchallenged
even by scientists, though before Darwin, as he is at
pains to record with all possible detail, some naturalists,
to make use of a very general term, expressed the opin-
45
ion that changed conditions of life had given rise to a
sufficient differentiation in individual forms to create
new species. Nor did Philosophy herself in those days
steer her bark far enough from the shores of dogma to
catch the broad sweeping current of the law of change.
Like a meteor, fell " The Origin of Species " into this
placid pool of thought, on the banks of which Theology,
Philosophy and the youngest of the pilgrims, Science,
had halted in their march several years before, and where
they still lingered dreaming dreams and telling each
other tales of folklore.
Instantly Science, his young blood and imagination
electrified by the message, darted forward on winged
feet, his eyes ablaze with the promise of measureless serv
ice to mankind. His elder companions paused awhile
sniffing the air for brimstone and calling after him to
stay his pace, but as in his wake followed first one and
then another of their disciples the chill of loneliness fell
upon them, and they too set out to overtake, if might
be, the leader now far in the distance.
To restate briefly the principal advanced by Darwin
in " The Origin of Species " it may be said that, all
forms of living organisms, plants and animals including
46
inan, are the lineal descendants of ancestors on the whole
somewhat simpler, that these again are descended from
yet simpler forms, and so on back to the single cell of
living matter the creation of which later scientists, such
as Lowell, ascribe to spontaneous chemical action. The
rise of the numberless species of living organisms now
existent, as well as those whose life history is recorded
only by fossil remains in the rocks of past geological
eras, Darwin attributes chiefly to natural selection dur
ing a long course of descent, aided in an important man
ner by the inherited effect of the use or disuse of parts,
and in an unimportant manner by external conditions
and by variations.
So far reaching has been the effect, in all departments
of science, occasioned by the changed viewpoint from
which subsequent investigations have been conducted,
that no words can adequately express it.
True, we the great mass of mankind, without special
ized scientific knowledge continue incapable of original
investigation, often even unable to fathom the terminol
ogy employed in the treatment of the less familiar sub
jects. To us the intricacies and minutiae of science con
tinue as a sealed book, but the far reaching principle of
47
evolution, in its wide application, now that our thoughts
have been intelligently directed toward it, presents itself
with so strong an appeal to our faculty of common-sense
and its simpler evidences are so clearly within range of
our observation that only one of unreceptive mind
reaches man s estate without consciousness of the change,
the development, the evolution in the world about him
even during the few short years of his existence.
Through this consciousness he, too, acquires a viewpoint
from which evolutionary law unfolds itself, as a natural
expression of the known forces of nature.
While Darwin in " The Origin of Species " refrained
from attempting to trace in detail the genealogy of any
particular species, certain conclusions were obvious by
analogy. The most revolutionary of these imaginatively,
though not scientifically, pointed directly to the origin
of the human race. These inferences a few years later
he presented with all the evidence at his command in
" The Descent of Man."
The shock produced did not spring directly from
the biological revelations nor from the realization that
the nearest extant ancestors of the lower races of man
are the anthropoid apes, but rather from the blow it dealt
48
the enormous vanity and egoism of the human species.
This egoism had built up out of itself the conception
that the universe had its being solely to accommodate
the needs of man who was of truth its centre ; and having
conceived the idea of a personal god insisted that he
bore the image of man. Correlative conclusions of dis
tinct creation and ready made mystical endowments
peculiar to his order, which as man was the classifier
he had declared to be entirely separate and unrelated to
any other order, naturally followed.
The disturbance of man s ideas of himself was in no
sense lessened by the knowledge that his material com
fort and well being were certain to be benefited by dis
coveries inspired by evolution nor that no tangible pos
session acquired during his entire history was endan
gered. A child of his imagination, the natural offspring
of his introspective and self -centered habit alone was
struck down. Yet to recover his mental balance was all
the harder for that very reason and not only on account
of the long period through which his erroneous concep
tion of himself had persisted but also because his spirit
ual concepts, systematized into religious dogma, had be
come interwoven with it A supernatural or divine
49
authority was claimed for these dogmas which were
dependent for their existence primarily on a mainte
nance of man s exaggerated egoism and incidentally on
his continued affirmation of the accuracy of historical
religious records at variance with the truth as demon
strable facts satisfying to his more developed powers of
reasoning assured him.
Nevertheless with rapidly increasing momentum man
is adapting himself to the more inspiring view which a
comprehension of his own place in the universe has given
him.
No lessening of the spiritual quality in his nature
comes with the growing understanding of nature, but
true to the universal law of evolutionary advance, it ex
pands. Though every dogma religion has hitherto pro
duced is probably false and destined to be discarded, yet
there can be no apprehension that with them will depart
religious feeling or spiritual sensitiveness. The passion
ate outcry raised on every hand when it was appreciated
that Darwin s discoveries meant the recasting of sub
stantially all established beliefs was not necessary to con
vince the world that ideas and emotions, the resultant
of mental operations, are far more real and hold a firmer
50
place in man s heart than any tangible product of his or
nature s hand. Scarcely is there a page of history but
bears upon its face this testimony.
As further and further man projects his intelligence
into the realms of space, as deeper and deeper he pene
trates into nature s mysteries, he gradually overcomes
the tendency to attempt the formularization of it all in
terms of self. His whole personality becomes more fluid
and vibrates in ever closer unison with the majestic
forces of Cosmos. From such an approach comes an
irresistible stimulus to all that is spiritual in him, to all
that quality underlying the consciousness that the prime
realities are the intangible and not those known to the
sensory organs. In such an approach lies also the sur
est promise that psychology, having taken as its watch
word, " the necessary acquirement of each mental capac
ity by gradation," will, profiting by that unison, disclose
to our intelligence the secret by which we may grasp
mentally those spiritual realities with as strong a sen
sory assurance as we now do the tangible.
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